


A Spell To Join Together Articles Which Have Been Parted

by kvikindi



Category: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (TV), Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
Genre: Multi, Post-Canon, english magic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-30
Updated: 2015-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-07 01:22:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 20,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4244166
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kvikindi/pseuds/kvikindi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Arabella Strange becomes a magician and a scholar, Emma Wintertowne energetically resists convention,  Flora Greysteel is haunted by a poetical ghost, John Segundus undertakes an overwhelming project, and English magic occasions much upheaval & many travels.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The House of the Three Graces

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place exactly midway between TV and book canon, but I will strive to clarify any inconsistency.

In the city of Rome, beside the Piazza di Spagna, at the very base of the so-called Spanish Steps, there stood a little peach house with cream-coloured trimming. It was not a distinguished house, despite its charming appearance; it was in that corner of the city, nearabouts the Piazza del Popolo, which is called the English Quarter, and the little peach house had indeed been principally occupied by Englishmen in the past. One such Englishman had died in the house in February of 1821, and the Roman authorities, fearing the spread of disease— for the Englishman had been ill, and furthermore a poet, and as he was a poet, likely a unclean fellow— ordered that the house be subsequently refurbished. Still, a certain sense of miasma endured, suspicious to renters. So the landlady of the house was very pleased when, in the spring of that year, she was approached by three young gentlewomen who wished to keep house together. It was an unorthodox arrangement, to be sure, and the ladies themselves were the subject of a certain amount of infamy, but they were very polite, and wealthy, and well-spoken, and— at the very least— they were better than poets. And two of them were married! though, it must be said, their marital circumstances seemed somewhat obscure.

It was thus that Emma Wintertowne, Arabella Strange, and Flora Greysteel first came to inhabit the house at 26 Piazza di Spagna.

They had been some while in Venice, a city which Miss Greysteel was greatly attached to, and where Mrs Strange had a good deal of business— her husband having left behind, in the chaos of his departure, many magical complications and more than a few unsettled debts.1 However, Miss Wintertowne (as she preferred to be known now, though she had once been Lady Pole) had opined that Venice was a dreary city, full of dark little alleys, and that she remained tired of labyrinths, and that furthermore, it caused Mrs Strange to dwell on her sorrows. Miss Wintertowne was sure they would all be a great deal more cheerful when they were out of Venice.2

It was true that relocation proved remarkably cheering. Mrs Strange thought that this was probably due less to the particular charms of Rome and more to— as Miss Wintertowne had foreseen— the departure from Venice, where her husband's presence so strongly lingered. She had found that she rather expected to see Jonathan's ghost around every turn. In Santa Maria Zobenigo, in the little courtyard with the fountain, and in the rooms that he had once inhabited, there were still strange corners where aspects of him lingered: a hastily scribbled note with a familiar finger-smudge; an unwashed shirt that smelled faintly of his scent; a single strand of auburn hair. She had collected all the pieces of the broken mirrors, and sometimes she spied something moving in their depths: the wave of a hand, the gleam of a waistcoat button.

For several months, she had thought that repairing the mirrors might be the key that would restore her husband to this world. She had not abandoned her quest to save Jonathan. Indeed, if anything, she had grown more determined as time dragged on. She had devoted her time in Venice to reading magical philosophy, and by the end of her first year, was casting some small practical spells. She could sense all about her now, when she entered Santa Maria Zobenigo, the echoes of the darkness that had been; sometimes she looked up and saw starlight, even at midday, or looked down into that little tangled well and saw a sun: a strange sun, the black sun of some other realm, a realm that breathed magic.

Nevertheless, nothing she did could bring the mirrors back together, or Jonathan back to her side. And after some time had passed, Miss Wintertowne complained of the hours that Mrs Strange spent gazing at the broken mirrors. Mrs Strange suggested that Miss Wintertowne perhaps did not quite understand, as she had not loved her husband, or at the least did not miss him. Miss Wintertowne declared that she did not esteem men such that any particular one's absence was notable. (This was a statement highly characteristic of Miss Wintertowne.) Mrs Strange observed that Miss Wintertowne's experience of the world was narrow, as she had spent much of it confined to Yorkshire or to her bed. Miss Wintertowne retorted that Mrs Strange was a fine one to talk of narrow experience, when she scarcely left her rooms and gazed at mirrors all day. Mrs Strange proposed that Miss Wintertowne was being childish. The conversation devolved rather significantly from this point.

Mrs Strange later admitted to herself, upon reflection, that perhaps she too had been a bit childish. After all, as a girl she had frequently indulged in that giggling, unserious sort of female magic which requires one to gaze at a mirror and recite a certain incantation so that the face of one's true love might appear, or variants on the same involving spinning, salt, apple peels, and songs. Sometimes she'd even thought that she'd caught a glimpse of something in that mirror. Auburn hair, she had assured herself in retrospect.

It was all well and good, but sooner or later, one had to grow up. One could not live all one's life sitting and watching a mirror, even if the man one loved were on the other side of it. So: yes, she thought. Perhaps better to leave Venice. Perhaps better to make a new start.

And it was a great joy to be in Rome once they had arrived there. It was a city, as she wrote to Mr Segundus,3 that was full of art and flush with the past: not haunted, like Venice, but brazenly discordant, mingling ancient ceremonial with rattling invention. Every day someone dug up fragments of empire, and yet life continued, atop the precarious layers of age upon age.

 _Our neighbours_ , she wrote to Mr Segundus soon after they arrived, _have begun referring to our lodgings as the 'House of the Three Graces.' The Three Graces! I cannot think that any of us is very gracious. Miss Wintertowne has become most strident in her good health, and declares herself a whole-hearted enemy of respectability; I, I am reliably told, have become over-serious, dreary, and sullen; as for Miss Greysteel, I am afraid that words really cannot suffice. She has taken to wearing men's clothing and has quite convinced herself that we are haunted. Well, you might think we are a little haunted, and perhaps I would agree. But she means by her reference to indicate Mr Keats, the previous occupant of the house, who died here during the previous winter. Miss Greysteel most fervently believes that he is now resident in our upstairs cupboard, where he does whatever it is ghosts do. Clank, I suppose, or shriek? Miss Absalom had lovely manners when Jonathan dreamt her, or so he told me, but I suppose the ghost of a poet would inevitably be more dramatic._

_Well, so you see, we are all in good health. We have a charming Italian landlady, three servant girls, and some rather nice furnishings. For magic, I have brought my own silver basin from Venice, as I am very used to it, and I have found an excellent apothecary on the Via Mario dei Fiori. I would be much obliged, however, if you might send me a parcel of sea air, a stone from Starecross, and several forked branches from a tree that has its roots in Northern England. (It must not be a yew tree, though any other kind will do quite well.)_

_If we are to cope with the ghost of Mr Keats, I should ask for a spell of banishment. But perhaps it will transpire that he is shy and sweet-tempered, in which case he would make a novelty amongst my companions— shyness and sweet temper not being among either Miss Greysteel's or Miss Wintertowne's noted qualities..._

Mrs Strange set down her pen. It was late; outside, the streets had grown quiet. The noise of carthorses' hooves upon the cobblestones had gradually died away. Her little candle in its brass dish flickered. She sighed. The time settled on her all of a sudden, and she felt terribly weary.

In Venice, she had felt somewhat that life was in abeyance. It had been like a long— very long— holiday, one in which you became lost in a foreign country, far from home, and queer things happened, but you were not frightened by them, because you knew that sooner or later the holiday would be over. But she had left Venice, which was as good as to say: the holiday was over. And here she was, and she was still a wife without a husband, practically a widow, quite alone in the world, and a magician en voyage. It would take, she thought, some growing used-to. It would have taken growing used-to for anyone.

She had just stood and arranged her night-clothes about her when there came a quiet knock at the door.

"Bell?" Miss Wintertowne said softly. "Are you sleeping?"

Mrs Strange answered the door. "No; I was writing."

"I was afraid I'd wake you."

"You didn't. Come in, it's all right; I swear."

At the invitation, Miss Wintertowne shuffled in. She was holding a candle. She set it on the nightstand and clambered into the bed. Her face, in the candlelight, was awash with shadows, yet very young. They were no strangers to each other's beds; in Venice, Miss Wintertowne had often been afraid to sleep, and she and Mrs Strange had taken to sleeping side-by-side: "so that," Miss Wintertowne had said, "at least we won't be alone, if someone..." "But no one will," Mrs Strange had whispered to her over and over, not entirely sure then that she believed it.

"Can you not sleep?" she asked Miss Wintertowne.

"No, I did. I dreamt horrors. And then, when I woke from them, I thought perhaps you were gone, or perhaps you had never been here."

"I'm here. Look: here is my hand." She reached out her hand, and Miss Wintertowne took it, in a surprizingly vigourous grasp.

"They said the other you was made of wood," Miss Wintertowne murmured. "Moss oak. But you are not made of wood; you are stronger than that."

Mrs Strange reluctantly smiled. "I like to think so. At the least, I am very stubborn. Come, make some room for me, and put out your candle."

They lay curled quietly together in the dark. Mrs Strange combed Miss Wintertowne's hair out with her fingers. It still had a little bone-white in it. They were both of them marked out in odd ways by magic. She remembered Jonathan's hair, its threads of silver. She herself had found one fine silver hair just a few days ago, above her temple. She had wept, not for aging, but from thinking about him. They had meant to grow old together. Now they would never do it; even if she found him, they would have missed these steps, and they could never get them back.

"To whom were you writing?" Miss Wintertowne asked her in a drowsy murmur.

"John Segundus."

"Oh, you are always writing him."

"He has been very kind. He asks after you."

"I do not wish for kindness." Miss Wintertowne's shoulders stiffened just a little.

"No. I know. I do not find it as terrible as you do."

This seemed to appease Miss Wintertowne, and after a little while, she asked, "What did you write to him?"

"All the usual things. About Rome. About you and Flora."

"She does not wish to be called Flora any longer," Miss Wintertowne said. There was a note of amusement in her tone.

Mrs Strange rolled her eyes heavenwards in the darkness. "Oh, really. Dare I ask what she wishes to be called?"

"She says: Sovay. Like the lady highwayman in the song.4 She says it is more distinguished than Flora."

Miss Wintertowne was not quite able to keep her voice from trembling with laughter as she spoke, which in turn made Mrs Strange incapable of swallowing her own, and in a moment they were both in quiet hysterics, rolling amidst the bedclothes, covering their mouths to muffle the sound.

"Oh, we're dreadful," Mrs Strange managed, when she could breathe again. "We're dreadful. I remember being that young."

Miss Wintertowne said, "I was married at that age."

"Yes; I suppose I was as well, or nearly." Mrs Strange wrinkled her nose. "I don't recall that it really helped much."

"No, I mean..." There was an odd note to Miss Wintertowne's voice. "I mean, I had already been enchanted."

Mrs Strange was silent. Her hand, fumbling on the bed, found Miss Wintertowne's hand and clutched at it silently, ferociously. After a while, she said, "When we were first married, Jonathan and I would write the most appalling letters to each other whenever we were apart for more than, oh, you know, a day. He tried to write me poetry. He was worse than I was."

Miss Wintertowne said softly, "It is a wonderful thing to be silly."

"Yes." Again, Mrs Strange was silent for a while. "I was thinking of that because... Mr Segundus wants to publish a collection of letters. Of Jonathan's letters, I mean. He has asked me to consider travelling to England. In the autumn, perhaps. To help him with the work."

"Will you?" Miss Wintertowne's eyes were like moons in the dark, turned very seriously towards her.

"I do not know. I haven't decided."

"You mustn't let me keep you here, Bell."

"I know. Nor I you." Mrs Strange thought about the small dark room in Venice where she had spent hours gazing into the remains of the mirrors, hoping— hungry for one brief glimpse— and Miss Wintertowne's aristocratic demeanour, the arrogance that had not been arrogance, she later recognized, but rather a kind of desperation.

"England," Miss Wintertowne said. The word was like an invocation. Like the tolling of a bell, not the kind that led you to Faerie, but the kind that led you out of it.

"Yes," Mrs Strange said. "I know." She pressed her face to Miss Wintertowne's shoulder. Miss Wintertowne always smelled slightly of juniper and woodsmoke, just as Mrs Strange herself did; it was a faint lingering scent of other worlds. Mrs Strange found it a comfort, though she could not say why. It was not much like England, or Jonathan, but it was familiar nonetheless.

"I told him that I would consider it," she said.

 

1Jonathan Strange was, on the whole, an upstanding and respectable person. However, one is apt to lose track of debts when one is mad, and, if one is mad and a magician, to do a certain amount of unintended damage. During her time in Venice, Mrs Strange saw to the reimbursement of a number of greengrocers whose business had suffered due to Mr Strange's intense horror of pineapples, and the subsequent magical exclusion of that fruit from the city of Venice. Mr Strange was also responsible for the appropriation (or, as some of the more strident wronged parties termed it, "theft") of every hen within half a kilometre of the city, apparently under the belief that there existed a cabal of gentlemen in Venice whose sole desire and purpose was to deprive him of boiled eggs.

At the same time, Mrs Strange was faced with the task of resolving the many magical difficulties suffered by the parish of Santa Maria Zobenigo that could perhaps best be termed "hauntings." There was a house in which a single sitting-room window had been enchanted so that, rather than shew the canal beyond it, it constantly displayed a small marsh in Yorkshire where the Raven King was said to have once lost a boot. (The family who lived in the house had discovered that the marsh was in Yorkshire by means of a limited conversation with some Yorkshiremen who happened to be trudging through the marsh on their return from poaching birds. The Yorkshiremen were quite surprized to find themselves talking to a party of Venetians, but they took the whole affair in good humour, and asked the Venetians if they would please not tell Lord W----- anything of how they had been poaching on his lands.)

There was also the case of a butcher who found that when he tried to slaughter cows, they merely subdivided into smaller and more numerous cows with each strike of the knife. (The same was true of pigs, but not, oddly, of sheep.) Then there was the case of a small tufted bird that perched next to the bed of a priest at Santa Croce degli Armeni and every night sang to him the names and locations of every sailor who had ever drowned in the city of Venice.

Fortunately, by the time Mrs Strange was made aware of these events, she had already become quite efficient at magic, and thus was able to resolve them to the satisfaction of the sufferers in question, and with a minimum of difficulty.

2Mrs Strange had been surprized to hear this opinion. She had thought that Miss Wintertowne, now released from her enchantment, would love Venice once more. After all, it had been painted on the walls of Miss Wintertowne's bedroom in London. However, when she thought on it further, she could begin to see how one's opinion of a place might change as one grew older. She recalled her own long-distant, childish dreams, in which Venice had figured as a sort of fairyland. Now, having been to both fairyland and Venice, it seemed to her that her dreams remained. Only she saw now that what she had dreamt of was not a city she could visit. It was a sort of life that she would have to live.

3Mrs Strange enjoyed a frequent and longstanding correspondence with Mr Segundus, which had begun when the latter wrote to her for some clarification on matters he hoped to address in his biography of Mr Strange. (Vide: Segundus, John. _The Life of Jonathan Strange._ London: John Murray, 1820.) Mrs Strange, in turn, had wished to put a number of questions to Mr Segundus regarding particularities of locative magic and that genre of magic which comprises spells to create keys for doors to which there are no locks. Mr Segundus was only too happy to be of assistance, and was also pleased to hear, from Mrs Strange's account, how Miss Wintertowne was well and quite recovered from her ordeal. From this point, they had continued to exchange letters.

4The ballad "Sovay" concerns a young woman who disguises herself as a highwayman in order to test the fidelity of the man she loves. Having given her lover a golden ring, she then accosts him in the guise of the highwayman and demands that he surrender it. When he declares that he would rather die than lose the ring, she is persuaded of his love.

The peculiar centrality of the ring to this tale has caused some scholars to suggest that is connected to an older magical tradition concerning a fairy servant who was bound to his master by a magical ring, and who conspired with his beloved, a Christian maidservant, to escape the ring so that they might be wed. Other scholars, however, dispute this assertion.


	2. The Shape of a Raven

Rome was a city of noise, not very much like London, which seemed to have a muffled quality to it. In London, the rain dimmed the ringing of church bells, and people went about in dark coats, and hooded their windows. Noise seemed raucous, improper. London had an inwardness. Rome, by contrast, flaunted and exulted in its sounds. From her second-floor window, Mrs Strange looked out over the piazza, where street vendors, flower-sellers and hawkers kept up a tumult. Carriages rattled past; tourists spoke in loud English. Sometimes sheep and goats ambled in a cascade of clacking, driven by country shepherds who shouted in round dialects. There was so much color, so much life: the scent of the wet flowers, newly torn up from the Campagna and still semi-blooming; the circling water down in Bernini's fountain, which stood at the base of the piazza and was shaped like a ship.

Miss Wintertowne loved Rome because, as she said, it was not much like Faerie. She did not even mind the tolling of bells from the nearby church, the Trinita dei Monti. They had a different tone to the bells of Faerie and England. Mrs Strange had also found this to be the case. All the sounds of Rome, and its sights, were unfamiliar. It was a relief, in many ways; it was like having no memory, in that no matter where you went, you were never reminded of anything.

Miss Greysteel detested Rome. "It has no mystery to it," she declared at the breakfast table, some two months after their arrival. "It is not like Venice. Venice is full of mystery. Rome is a Christian city, and I reject the Christian superstition."

Mrs Strange said mildly, "Do you? Oh, dear."

"I would much rather have magic than tedious old vicars."

"Mrs Strange's brother is a curate," Miss Wintertowne observed with an air of helpfulness. "Her father was as well, wasn't he, Arabella?"

"Yes, in Shropshire." Taking pity on Miss Greysteel, who now wore a dismayed expression, Mrs Strange said, "I have never seen why magic and religion must be at odds. After all, the Raven King was known to have dealings with saints. And Mr Strange was irreligious long before he took up magic; it was more to do with his generally lackadaisical nature, I believe. I am a Christian and a magician, and I do not find it difficult at all."

"Well," Miss Greysteel said, sounding disgruntled, "you are an exception, I suppose."

"Perhaps I am." Mrs Strange could, in fact, have offered a number of counter-examples— Miss Greysteel's education, she thought, had been rather haphazard, which perhaps explained her tendency to run away with poets, attach herself to magicians and their wives, alter her name, and take up fashionable attitudes— but she was somewhat distracted by thoughts of her brother, and let the moment pass.

She had written to Henry following her resurrection. He had begged her to return to England and live with him, but she could not countenance the thought. She'd imagined trying to tell him that Jonathan was not dead, about the pledge she had made to bring him back, about what had transpired in Lost-hope, about tumbling out of a mirror, that she had taken up magic. It seemed an impossible prospect. She thought he had not been wrong to grieve her death; the Arabella he knew had perished. He had buried her in Shropshire.

People said he had believed that Jonathan killed her, or that her death had driven Jonathan mad. Some letters had been published, libellously altered— Henry had disclosed Jonathan's behavior while she was dead— accusations of black magic had been broadly made— still: _I forgive you_ , she had written to him. _Please forgive me, and Jonathan as well. I regret that we dragged you into our world; I know that it is not what you wanted._ He had hated Ashfair, with its air of magic, so how much more must he hate all this? She could not blame him, but neither could she return. There was no returning from who she was now, or from magic.

Across the breakfast table, Miss Greysteel was hacking at an egg-top. "At any rate," she said, rather sulkily, "you must admit that Rome has no mystery about it."

Mrs Strange said, "As for myself, I feel I have had my fill of mystery."

She ought to have known it was an imprudent thing to say. It was as good as inviting mystery, which was to say, perhaps one step up from inviting danger, but on the whole likely to prove almost as exhausting.

Much later in the day, she was labouring at magic. She thought that it must be different, as a practice, than it had been for Jonathan, and certainly than it had been for Mr Norrell. There had been so many books, now gone forever, that Jonathan had read— days when he had scarcely moved from a chaise-longue, just sat in his dressing-gown, shirt half-open, his bare feet tucked up under him and a book in his hands. Oh, the memory of it! His tousled curls. A befuddled look. His half-empty teacup. Ink on his thumb. Those stacks of antique volumes, with their leather bindings, which had lent a faint library-scent to him. An irretrievable loss. How could one recover?

Though not all of the vanished literature was lost, or not really. In Venice, Mrs Strange had worked to record what she remembered. After all, she had been half her husband's amanuensis, correcting his proofs and drawing illustrations; and she had read Mr Lascelles' book, and his dreadful periodicals. She had read a surprising amount, in fact. It was a place to start.

Her magic did not resemble Jonathan's, except perhaps in the very basics. She could quarter water in a silver basin, and use it to locate almost any lost object; she could draw up visions in the basin, with some effort. She knew how to entreat a flower to bloom out of season, how to invite water to spring forth from a stone, and how to learn from a piece of wood the names of every man who has touched it, and every use it has had since it was cut from the earth. Her greatest success, however, was in the reading of tea leaves— which was a source of some irritation to her. No real magicians read tea leaves, so far as she knew. It seemed very much a yellow-curtain type of endeavour, what even Jonathan might have thought an unrespectable sort of spell. And yet— there it was! Such was her talent. With a very minor enchantment of her own devizing,1 she was able to tell if it would rain tomorrow, whether the price of fish would rise, the political fortunes of Miss Wintertowne's former husband, and any number of interesting futures.2

On this particular afternoon, when Mrs Strange gazed into her teacup, she was very much surprized to see that there would be a visitor tomorrow, and that this visitor had travelled to Rome from England. She had certainly not expected a visitor, and she could not think who it might be. She could not easily imagine Mr Segundus making the voyage, particularly as he was quite occupied with his academy; Henry, she thought, would not imagine such a notion; and most of her London friends had been distanced by scandal, or had proved less than faithful when they learned that she was not dead.

"We shall have a mysterious visitor," she informed Miss Wintertowne over dinner.

Miss Wintertowne's expression turned wary. "How mysterious?"

"He is coming from England, not from Faerie."

"That is not so reassuring as you might think; one is nearly as bad as the other. And anyway, I should quite like to see Stephen."

"He is a lord now, is he not? We ought not call him 'Stephen' any longer."

Miss Wintertowne frowned. "I must call him something. And I do not know what to call a fairy lord."

Miss Greysteel was eyeing the pair of them enviously. It was her greatest wish to be invited to a fairy ball, a wish that— when first expressed— did not win her much favor with Miss Wintertowne. She had asked Mrs Strange, in the most unsubtle manner, whether Mr Black had been married, and if so, had his wife accompanied him to Faerie? Would the fairies expect him to take a wife from among them? Was he very handsome? Would Mrs Strange introduce him to Miss Greysteel? Mrs Strange thought that she could imagine little more distasteful than the need to explain to Miss Greysteel's father that his daughter had run away with a black man, Lord Pole's former butler, to rule over his kingdom in Faerie. This, no doubt, explained the idea's appeal for Miss Greysteel.

"I wonder," Mrs Strange said, "if it might be one of those magical hangers-on, the learned society of such-and-such bores. They are all a nuisance; they wish to talk of nothing but Jonathan for hours."

"Then you should get along quite well, I would think," Miss Wintertowne said, and ducked as Mrs Strange flicked a crumb of pastry at her.

Miss Greysteel said, "Perhaps I might have a visitor. I have friends in England, though I know I am not so notorious as you."

"We are quite notorious," Miss Wintertowne agreed. She did not appear displeased by the idea. "Or perhaps it might be your ghostly Mr Keats. Perhaps he has a visitor arriving."

Miss Greysteel's face turned slightly flushed. "Mr Keats is not an imaginative figment. I do not like your implication."

"Lord knows I do not imply anything. I should be the last to imply, in circumstances. I have been raised from the dead, and enchanted, and brought back from Faerie. Tuning forks hum whenever I hold them; cats run away from me when we meet. Did you know that, Arabella?"

"No," Mrs Strange said, thoughtful. "However, it is interesting. I myself have experienced somewhat similar effects.3 Mr Honeyfoot, you know, in his essay _Concerning the Consecration of Ruins and Agglomeration of Magical Substance_ , has offered a theoretical argument that no magic ever truly ends. He believes that over time, it accretes like rust. He means this argument to address the common belief, which I am sure you have heard, that all ruined buildings—"

"—belong," Miss Wintertowne finished, "to the Raven King. Yes, I know. I believe I should be offended. Bell, do you mean to imply that I am a ruined building?"

Mrs Strange said, "Perhaps we are both ruined buildings."

* * *

The next day, Mrs Strange put on her wine-colored coat and her best striped skirt, and arranged herself in the sitting room to annotate a book. She was eating an apple, and had warned the servants that the house was expecting a guest for tea.

The book was _Some Observations on the Life of Thomas Lanchester, With Particular Attention to Animal Languages_ , which Mr Segundus had sent her. It was less a compleat volume than an epigraph, but Mr Segundus had written that it contained _some of the very most exciting and forward-thinking appraisals of Lanchester's relations with Other Lands, a topic which has occasioned much discussion of late at the York Society. I permit myself to think that the appendical comparison between the intended understanding of_ exilium _and_ wræclast _might be of the very most interest to you. Oh, how I lament the loss of Lanchester's own volume! Oh, Mrs Strange! When I think of it! It brings the keenest sorrow into my heart. Nevertheless, we must forge on, I suppose. As the philosopher said, Πάντα χωρεῖ._

As was usual with Mr Segundus, the letter contained a four-page digression upon a theoretical topic, written in tiny, meticulous script— the topic in this case being the narrative structure of spells— and another, two pages, upon the behavior of students. Mr Segundus found the behavior of students most perplexing. _Their purpose, their very raison d'être, as it were, is to learn, yet it is with the greatest difficulty that one convinces them to undertake it! They direct the greatest portion of their talent towards avoiding labour, perhaps in the fashionable belief that what is good ought to be natural, which is to say, requiring no exertion._

Mrs Strange had been very amused by Mr Segundus' reference to what he termed a "fashionable belief." She thought of him, perhaps unkindly, as a provincial sort of person, and it was a delight to imagine him reading Byron— one assumed: with disapproval on his serious little face.

As though supernaturally aware that someone in the house was thinking of Byron, Miss Greysteel cursed loudly in the room overhead. She had taken up the most distressing habits, of which cursing was one, and would not be reformed of them. Mrs Strange dreaded to think of her eventual reunion with her father.4

"Miss Greysteel?" Mrs Strange called, when a thump followed the cursing. (She had been in the habit of calling Miss Greysteel Flora, but she could not bring herself to call her _Sovay_.)

"It's nothing!" Miss Greysteel called back. "I'm all right! It's only the ghost!"

"Lord, the ghost," Miss Wintertowne said, rolling her eyes. She was reading a novel on the sopha, with her feet propped on an ottoman.

Mrs Strange, who felt a little protective of Miss Greysteel, might have answered her sharply, but there was a knock at the door, and a servant girl announced, "Begging your pardons, but there is a Lieutenant Colonel Colquhoun Grant to see you, Mrs Strange."

In all her deliberations upon potential visitors, the name of Lieutenant Colonel Grant had scarcely entered Mrs Strange's mind. She recalled him, of course: a very dashing officer with whom Jonathan had served in the Peninsula. Mrs Strange would not have called him Jonathan's particular friend, but certainly they had been much together in London, and after— after, he had been Jonathan's great defender. But she had not had any letters from him, and she could not think why he should turn up in Rome.

He looked much the same as he had looked before, though a little more tired and slightly haggard. There was a certain stiffness in his bearing that suggested he, too, was aware of the eccentricity of his visit; yet the splendour of his uniform lent him an authority and grandeur that strived to make up for this.

"Mrs Strange," he greeted her.

Mrs Strange had risen at his entrance. She said rather blankly, "Colonel Grant." Then, remembering herself, "May I introduce Miss Emma Wintertowne, who sometimes has the honour to be Lady Pole."

Miss Wintertowne had not risen, nor looked up from her novel. She said, "Oh, really, Arabella; I would not call it an honour."

Mrs Strange repressed the urge to rub her temple. "Miss Wintertowne," she said, "Lieutenant Colonel Colquhoun Grant. Colonel Grant, would you like some tea?"

Miss Wintertowne had absented herself before the tea was brought in. In typical form, she declined to excuse herself from the room. Mrs Strange said to Lt Colonel Grant, "I must apologize for Miss Wintertowne's manners. She does not care for convention, I am afraid, and even less for gentlemen."

"It is quite all right," Grant said, waving his hand in an aristocratic fashion. "I confess I scarcely knew what to expect of such a person."

"Do you mean someone who has been raised from the dead? Or perhaps someone who has been in Faerie." Mrs Strange raised her eyebrows inquisitively, aware that she was offering a challenge.

Lt Colonel Grant looked uncomfortable. After a long silence, he said, "You are not surprized by my visit."

"I am a magician now; there is very little that can surprize me."

"I had been under the impression that you disliked magic."

Mrs Strange said, "My circumstances, as I'm sure you appreciate, are now different."

"So I see," Grant said.

They eyed each other, like two wary animals at circle. How odd, Mrs Strange thought, that I should unnerve him. But it was plain that she did. She had not thought herself a creature who could provoke such a reaction, a... well, a strange creature. "I expect you find me very much changed," she said.

He studied her. He had keen eyes. "Not... physically."

"You know that I mean to find my husband."

"Yes; they talk about it in London."

"Oh, I can just imagine that they do." She could not quite keep the bitterness from her voice. She had not forgiven London yet. Perhaps she understood, a little, Miss Wintertowne's break from her husband; the question was a simple one: _How could you believe...?_ Or an indictment: _You could have acted, but chose not to act._ London, she thought, was like a dog-pack at a fox hunt, all the little hounds baying for no other reason than that they scented blood. All they wanted to do was find the next blood, and the next; they cared little about what became of the foxes. To them, all foxes were one and the same.

"I am sorry," Grant said rather suddenly. "I believe I owe you an apology. I ought to have written to you, when I heard you were returned, and offered my assistance. I did not quite know what the protocol might be, I confess. And then— I thought your husband mad, before, which I regretted."

"Well," Mrs Strange pointed out, "he _was_ mad. So I would think you are forgiven on that count. And as for all of the rest..." She toyed with her cup of tea. "I know you were his advocate in London. It was much appreciated. Captain Hadley-Bright speaks very highly of you." 5

"I liked your husband very much," Lt Colonel Grant said. "He saved my life, once, you know, in the Peninsula, when I was captured by the French." Grant frowned. "I had not thought of it in— well, in quite some while. And then— it was the most curious thing. I was in the Cape for a year, with my regiment, and as I was sailing home... I had just caught sight of England. All of a sudden it came into my mind..."

His voice had taken on a vague, abstracted quality. Mrs Strange was sitting quite still. Her skin prickled with magic.

"It was so vivid," Lt Colonel Grant said in the same distant tone. "Just as though it were Spain, ten years ago, and Merlin— we all used to call him Merlin— was sitting just there, drinking claret, with— he had a sort of tremor in his hand—"

"Yes," Mrs Strange said. "He brought it home from the war."

She did not think that Grant had heard her speak. "All at once," he said, "it seemed to me that I had done you a great wrong, and that I must go to Rome immediately, and that— that I had to deliver a message."

"What?" Mrs Strange asked. She found her own voice quite frightening in that moment. "What is the message?"

All at once, it was as though the windows had flung open, and the whole house had been stirred by a powerful wind. Doors crashed against walls, and the teacups rattled. There was a smell of juniper and woodsmoke and lightning, a warm summer thunderstorm scent: rain on grey moss and the wet stones of England. Mrs Strange felt as though someone had reached inside her and reeled all of the air out of her chest. When she touched her teacup, sparks flew from her fingers. She tipped the cup towards her and saw that the tea leaves had settled. Their damp flecks formed the shape of a raven, its claws curled under and its wide dark wings outstretched.

* * *

Lt Colonel Grant had taken a room near the Piazza di San Lorenzo, and Mrs Strange insisted on seeing him safely to it once she she had ensured that he was no longer under any enchantment. For that he had been under an enchantment she was certain, though a performance of Belasis's Scopus did not serve to clarify matters, as every room in the house proved full of magic. Indeed the chief result of casting this spell had been to put Grant out of temper. He was quite out of temper already, having the strongest objection to being enchanted "all willy-nilly," as he termed it, and was most suspicious that Mrs Strange might enchant him further.

"You must admit," he said to her as they were leaving the house, "that the whole business is dashed uncanny. I had no notion at all of going to Rome, and yet here I am nonetheless!"

"I am sorry it has inconvenienced you," Mrs Strange replied. "I find it is in the nature of magic to be inconvenient."

"Do you think that it is, you know—" Grant looked uncomfortable. It was the look of a man who is very much afraid that he might be accused of having an emotion. "Do you think that it is _him?_ "

"My husband? I don't know," Mrs Strange said. "I suspect it is something larger. I suspect it means—" she sighed— "I am to go to England."

Grant studied her face. "Is it such a dreadful prospect?"

Mrs Strange said, "I have not yet decided, I suppose."

The sun was setting before them, somewhere beyond the river, over the spires of churches and the shingled roofs, the white stone buildings and the smooth cupolas. The visible past poked out of the skyline like a garden run amok, roses here and there above a wildflower thicket. The Eternal City, was what they called Rome, but in fact, Mrs Strange reflected, only bits of it lasted forever. The rest died, or went to seed and was regrown, and slowly, slowly, the city changed substance, until one could not recognize it from what it had been before.

Mrs Strange touched Grant's arm as they neared his hotel. "Will you wait for me, if I should require an escort?"

Grant said grudgingly, "Well, I must wait for the tide in Naples, I suppose."

"Thank you; it is very kind of you."

"But there is to be no magic! Do you understand me, Mrs Strange? A gentleman cannot be fetched to and fro, as though he were some sort of— of message-pigeon! No; I cannot tolerate it at all!"

"I believe I know," Mrs Strange said, "precisely how you feel."

When she arrived back at the house on the Piazza di Spagna, she found, as she had expected, that Miss Wintertowne was waiting in the sitting room. Twilight was gathering about the window; the air had cooled, and night was coming in. A bell tolled from the church at the top of the piazza. There still hung about the house, like the smoke of a candle, such a sense of the wild and a fragrance of it that Mrs Strange considered it could not be comfortable for Miss Wintertowne, who had made abundantly clear how little she cared for magic.

"You are going to England," Miss Wintertowne said without any preamble. Her face was very drawn, and her mouth was pinched. "Are you not? You must be frank with me, Arabella."

Mrs Strange felt very weary. She took a seat on the sopha beside Miss Wintertowne. She said carefully, "I believe I have received something in the nature of a summons."

"Who summons you? No one can summon you. Kings summon subjects. But you and I— we have no kings." Her gaze was ferocious; it dared Mrs Strange to contradict her.

"No kings and no husbands," Mrs Strange said.

Miss Wintertowne fell silent. She had assumed, Mrs Strange observed, a deliberate and somewhat queenly posture. It made her look very fierce, as though she might declare a war, or suddenly demand that someone cut off a head.

"You did not object so before," Mrs Strange pointed out quietly. "You said I ought not to let you keep me here."

"Yes; yes, you may go to England for Segundus and his letters, or for his silly school, or for your brother, even, if you must; but not for magic! Not for magic. Do not let yourself be bound so."

"I am not bound," Mrs Strange said. "Or— perhaps I am. Love is a kind of binding. It limits your freedom, which is I think why you do not want it. You long above all other things to be free."

Miss Wintertowne looked at her for a long time with large, tired eyes. "Yes," she said. "Of course. I wish for freedom."

Mrs Strange found herself contemplating a passage from one of Mr Segundus' letters, concerning the renewed popularity experienced in England by the Raven King. _It is the most curious of passions,_ Mr Segundus had written, _for there is not one in a dozen of those magicians in Yorkshire today, nor I think in any region of John Uskglass' former domains, who does not pledge himself wholeheartedly to that King in the North. He does not demand from them any homage; neither does he offer them anything, unless one considers the great gift that is called English magic. Rather, their loyalty appears to stem from some wellspring of love, as though— oh, I am no poet! you shall have to forgive my poor words!— they had loved John Uskglass before they knew him; they had loved him before they gave him a name, and they had only been waiting for him to appear. You will see by these words I am not wholly unaffected. But then I am a magician, and if I may say so a Yorkshireman now, and it seems to me most natural that I should love my king. There, you see—! 'My king,' as though I had somehow become his subject! But you will agree it is the most paradoxical aspect that he does not subject me to anything._

It had been Jonathan whom she meant, the man she loved and was bound to, but Mrs Strange thought that perhaps love was all of a piece. Once one had figured out the trick— when one could recognize its motions— one need no longer fear being imprisoned by love; for you perceived it was not a trap or a fairy bargain that threatened to sieve your life away. It was not that at all. It was a hand reaching through darkness.

"Would you come?" she asked Miss Wintertowne, after a long silence had passed between them. "Would you come to England with me, if I asked you? I would not compel you, not for anything in the world."

Miss Wintertowne took her hand and laced their fingers together. "I know you would not. Well; ask me, then."

Mrs Strange said, "Come with me, Emma. We ought not be parted."

"Of course I will," Miss Wintertowne said.

* * *

1 Given the destruction of so many of the books of English magic, many of Mrs Strange's enchantments were necessarily of her own devizing. She had based them upon her recollections of her husband's work, upon books about English magic, or upon what magical literature Mr Segundus could provide her. This did not cause so much difficulty as one might imagine; Mrs Strange had found that once one achieved a correct execution of magic, and spent some little time repeating it, one acquired a sense of its underlying structure much as one learnt to play music. She had always been quite adept at the musical arts— she could play the pianoforte a little, and carry a tune— and magic seemed to require the same aptitude. Thus she found herself keeping a little diary of spells, very much like a recipe-book.

2 Miss Wintertowne exhibited an unhealthy interest in her husband's (for, in truth, he was not her former husband in any but the practical sense) unhappy circumstances. She solicited gossip from other expatriates and, as she had few English friends, constantly implored Mrs Strange to enquire about Lord Pole in her letters to, among others, Mr Segundus— an ill-chosen tactic, as Mr Segundus was deeply confused by politics. Miss Wintertowne's interest was not, as a romantic mind might suppose, the result of some abiding passion, but rather something of the opposite: she took the keenest pleasure in his adversities, and celebrated his setbacks with a triumph that was, Mrs Strange felt, unbecoming of a lady.

3 Mrs Strange had discovered that, in addition to an aptitude for magic, she had developed a tendency to shed sparks during thunderstorms. She also, like Miss Wintertowne, was much disliked by cats— which was curious, she reflected, for Jonathan was surrounded by magic, yet most animals liked him; at least, the better-tempered ones always had. It was difficult to dislike Jonathan, she had observed, regardless of one's intentions; one had to make a special effort to do it.

In truth, the experiences that Mrs Strange and Miss Wintertowne describe are very similar to those of other men and women subjected to long enchantments. The Aureate magician Gilles de Marston was most interested in such cases, and described a woman who had been cursed by a fairy to sleep for 288 years. When at last awoken through the intervention of John Uskglass (Marston's own account has been lost; however, vide: "The Boat-Master of North Ferriby and What Happened to His Daughter," in Lord Portishead's _Collected Tales of the Raven King,_  London: John Murray, 1819), she was perfectly well, but no cow would allow her to approach it, nor any cats, nor any sheep; she was struck by lightning seventeen times, without evident harm, and when she passed her hand over a bowl of water, the water itself could be heard to sing. The cause of these manifestations remains unclear.

4 Miss Greysteel's father had been reluctant in the first place to surrender his daughter into the dubiously appropriate hands of two such chaperones as Mrs Strange and Miss Wintertowne; he had been persuaded to do so only by the suspicion that whatever follies Miss Greysteel engaged in under this supervision would be significantly less extravagant than she might achieve alone. Besides, Mr Greysteel had expressed, both Mrs Strange and Miss Wintertowne seemed like rather serious, sensible people, so perhaps one could not quite believe what the newspapers said...? It was also the case that Miss Greysteel had declared she would not marry, and instead would become a sorceress, and Mr Greysteel was keen to avert this possibility. Better the company of two married women, he considered— and one so devoted to her husband!— than the more revolutionary magical climate of England.

5 Captain Hadley-Bright was a young officer who had served with Mr Strange and Lt. Colonel Grant at Waterloo, and who had later become interested in magic. Mr Strange had expressed an intention of taking Captain Hadley-Bright as his pupil, and when he was driven from England, Captain Hadley-Bright, in his absence, became a passionate champion of Mr Strange's character and cause. When it was reported that Mrs Strange had appeared in Venice, Captain Hadley-Bright was among the first to offer her his support and aid. Indeed, he was so enthusiastic— he had a tendency to write in large, looping capital letters, and to underline certain sentiments about which he felt strongly with looping flourishes, for emphasis— that Mrs Strange found him a little exhausting, though she was mindful of his generosity of spirit.


	3. A Magician En Voyage

 

"England!" Miss Greysteel said in a voice of disbelief. "But I do not wish to go to England!"

Miss Wintertowne said uncharitably, "No one has asked you to."

"Emma!" Mrs Strange reproved her.

They were enjoying an evening repast from a nearby _trattoria_. Mrs Strange reflected wistfully that she would miss Italian food; it was delightfully unlike the heavier English fare. Boiled puddings, that was what she could look forward to. Boiled puddings and custard. She took a small bite of her _zabaglione_ in regret. It occurred to her to wonder if the Continent had spoilt her. Whatever would people in Shropshire have said? She would have laughed at herself, not so long ago. Plain little practical Arabella.

"Well, of course I shall go with you," Miss Greysteel was saying. "I cannot very well stay here! You are my chaperones, and— I should get into terrible trouble without you! I might very well run off with another poet! Two poets! Who can say? I might travel to Greece and take up the revolutionary cause!"

"Goodness," Miss Wintertowne said. "We must oppress you very much."

Firmly, Mrs Strange said, "Of course you will come with us to England. I'm sure there are many learned gentlemen there who would be most interested to meet you, given your proximity to magical events of the recent age."

"Given my proximity to your husband, you mean." Miss Greysteel's face had turned faintly stormy. "I do not wish to be valued as a sort of— onlooker."

"There is also the small and, I am sure, very inconsiderate matter of my rescue," Mrs Strange pointed out, very drily. "After all, it was you who awaited me in Venice."

"Oh, I did not do anything. I merely sat beside a mirror all day, like some sort of dreadful Arthurian damsel. I do not care for Arthurian damsels. All they do is die in the most simpering fashion. Except the wicked ones."

"I always rather liked Viviane," Miss Wintertowne said thoughtfully. "The woman who entombs Merlin in a stone forever."1

"The men of the army used to call my husband Merlin," Mrs Strange said. The reflection came to her unbidden. She felt rather blank. "Colonel Grant called him that."

Miss Wintertowne's face changed. "I didn't mean— Bell—"

"Excuse me. I must pack my books." Mrs Strange pushed her chair back from the table. "And I find I am no longer have much appetite."

It was quite out of character for her, she thought, when she had reached her bedroom. She never lost her temper. And Miss Wintertowne could not have been expected to know— but still the thought of it, Jonathan pent up forever, in a small dark space under the earth, where no one could reach him, or ever touch him. Norrell was with him, of course, in the Darkness— but Norrell did not like to touch people, not even to shake hands, and Jonathan so needed to be touched. He needed an embrace, a hand on his shoulder. His father had not liked to touch him, either. She remembered the child Jonathan: mop-headed, a spoilt thing, very noisy, prone to storms of tears. Underneath, she had found this surprising sweetness. She'd had to nurture it. Now it hurt for her to think of.

The door creaked open behind her. She turned, expecting Miss Wintertowne to be there. But it was Miss Greysteel, looking cowed and timid.

Mrs Strange affected to have been unpinning her hair rather than brooding. "What is it, Flora? What do you want?"

"Miss Wintertowne is sorry," Miss Greysteel said. "And so am I. I ought not to have raised the topic of your husband."

"It's perfectly fine. I speak about him often."

"Yes, but— I'm sorry," Miss Greysteel said. She looked down at her hands. "And I don't mean to disdain England, really, especially if— you're on a sort of quest, and you must do whatever you can to save your husband, of course. I think it's absolutely blisteringly noble. You're so determined, you don't ever give up, but for me it's different, you see, going back to England, because it's just so— so _suffocating_ , I can hardly bear it, it's why I ran away in the first place, and to go back in defeat, as though my whole life were already over— as though it had ended— and have all those horrible people sneer at me—"

Mrs Strange sighed deeply, and sat on the edge of her bed. "Why don't you come here, Flora. Sit down."

Miss Greysteel collapsed rather than sat. She wasn't crying, but Mrs Strange thought it was probably because she was far too proud to do it. "They _will_ sneer, you know they'll sneer," Miss Greysteel said. "In that way they have, as though they knew some awful secret about you."

"Quite probably," Mrs Strange agreed. "English ladies sneered at me back in Venice. They considered Miss Wintertowne and myself to be curiosities."

"But you are married, so it is different. You may do as you like."

She had to laugh at that. "Is that what you think?"

"At least they will not expect you to marry again, or to behave in a certain manner until you do. I thought I had quite incinerated that notion, with Lord Byron, but now I feel they'll simply say, _Oh, look, Miss Greysteel has had to slink off to Yorkshire,_ or _wherever-shire,_ you know, _in shame._ "

Mrs Strange put an arm around her shoulders. She felt struck all of a sudden by the spirit of the mother that she might have been, the mother she had once imagined being. "They'll say that," she said, "and just think how stupid they'll look to someone like you or me, who considers the wild strange things that you've done. Not many young ladies would have waited for me, you know. Even fewer would have gone into Mr Strange's darkness. And then— I shall always esteem you for befriending my husband, when he was so lost and so alone. They disapproved of that, as well, didn't they?"

Miss Greysteel nodded.

Which was half why you did it, Mrs Strange thought, but then— it didn't really matter. What mattered was the bold girl who had shewn kindness to Jonathan when he needed kindness. "So you must not mind," she said. "You must not mind what they say." She was astonished to find that her voice was shaky. Perhaps it was the thought of Jonathan. Perhaps it was the thought of being a mother.

Miss Greysteel gave her a watery smile. "Thank you," she said.

"Anyway, you may yet find some excitement in England. It is not so dull as all that. Perhaps you'll discover a talent for magic."2

Miss Greysteel laughed uncomfortably. "I don't think so," she said. "I suppose anything's possible."

"In my experience," Mrs Strange said, "anything certainly is."

* * *

Miss Greysteel had emphasized once more how sorry Miss Wintertowne was, and Mrs Strange thought perhaps that would be the end of it— often when Miss Wintertowne had made some hurtful remark of which she later found herself ashamed, she would not apologize, but would rather spend a day or two gazing pleadingly at Mrs Strange, her behavior uncharacteristically meek, until she felt confident that she had been forgiven. It was one of those traits that ought to offend, but that you grow fond of— at least, Mrs Strange found it thus.

But Miss Wintertowne knocked on her door, at about a quarter to midnight. She did not look as though she had been sleeping. Her hair hung against her shoulder blades in smooth dark waves. She said quietly, "Bell, I came to apologize."

"It's all right. I am not so easily wounded as you imagine."

"I know. But I suppose I am— well, I am a thorn that does not mean to prick sometimes."

"You are a forest of thorns," Mrs Strange said. She left the door open and went to sit at her writing desk. She had just noticed a stain of ink on her thumb. So much of her life was letters, she thought. Almost as though that were the only place she existed.

 _It is strange_ , Mr Segundus had written, _how often I feel enfranchised to disclose the utmost of my interior thoughts to you, when in truth our acquaintance in England was brief. Oh, how I hope you are not offended by this statement. I have tried to shape it so that it will in no way offend! Perhaps it is because we do not know one another, and need not fear each other. You are a distant entity to me! And because you are a married lady, whom I esteem greatly, and in this state one may be more free, without the particular fear of misapprehension._ It was simple to write oneself into letters. Harder to make sense of people in the flesh. So many things in her life were difficult and painful; in ink, at least, she could be incisive and witty about them; she could write herself as laughing about, for instance, a ridiculous moment of weepiness over a boiled egg, without admitting how very much it had hurt her. In the flesh you could not hide the hurtfulness. Perhaps if one were a fierce person, like Emma–

"I wish I could not be," Miss Wintertowne said. Her face was half in shadow. "I suppose it is in my nature to be so full of brambles."

"I have grown used to your nature," Mrs Strange said. "But I suppose I never do get used to grief. It is a strange thing. It doesn't seem to get older. So I find myself constantly surprised by how new it is to me. It never tarnishes, or loses its sharp edges. I think if Jonathan were dead, it might—" She lost her voice for a moment. "But. So. I'm sorry."

Miss Wintertowne wrapped her arms around Arabella's shoulders. "I grieve," she said. "Sometimes I grieve. I think of the life I might have had. I wonder if I might have had children. But you're right; it's easier, I think— you just forge on ahead, then. You don't look back."

"That makes me think of Orpheus and Eurydice. There are so many rules, aren't there, for dealing with the dead. The living are much harder to deal with."

"Rule-breakers," Miss Wintertowne said. "The living are rule-breakers."

Mrs Strange considered. "You make it sound rather daring, being alive."

"Isn't it?" Miss Wintertowne said.

* * *

They had arranged for Lieutenant Colonel Grant to accompany them all the way to Starecross. He too had been contacted by Mr Segundus, it seemed— some matter of letters that Mr Strange had sent to Grant, or Grant had sent to Mr Strange— and while he "would not normally subject [him]self to such a place as Yorkshire," he declared, he submitted grudgingly to the prospect of the visit at Mrs Strange's urging.

The three ladies were to meet him at the Villa da Londra in Naples, an inn where many Englishmen stayed. Miss Greysteel and Miss Wintertowne were well acquainted with the area, having previously made the journey from England to Rome; however, Mrs Strange, who had merely stepped out of a mirror into Venice, found everything very foreign. She thought that perhaps this foreignness explained why, in the _vettura_ on the road to Naples, she had the oddest sense that something was not quite right— that there was some aspect of the small rickety carriage that was ever-so-slightly askew. She did not mention this to her travelling-companions, who at any rate seemed quite absorbed in a competition to establish which of them might be considered more world-weary. 3

When they arrived in Naples, all three in rather a bad temper as a result of their travelling, Lieutenant Colonel Grant professed himself amazed to see that they had chosen to travel by carriage, and not by mirror.

"Is it not the done thing?" he enquired. "I confess it always seemed to me most convenient. Mr Strange was always dashing in and out of mirrors."

"Yes; and see what has become of Mr Strange," Mrs Strange remarked.

Grant flinched slightly. "My apologies, madam. I meant no disrespect."

Mrs Strange said, "It is quite all right. Miss Wintertowne does not care for mirrors, and you, I recall, do not care for magic; as for myself, I chuse not to risk the King's Roads. I considered it wiser to journey in the conventional fashion."

She had cause to significantly rethink this statement by her fourth day at sea.

Having never been to sea, she could have had no idea! no notion! The terrible, nauseous, unceasing heave! The salt- and fish-stench, and the smoke from the oil lamps at night! The sweat of unwashed bodies packed close to one another! They had so lately booked passage aboard the _Thomas Dundale_ 4 that it was necessary for herself, Miss Greysteel, and Miss Wintertowne to share a berth with Lt Colonel Grant, and only a canvas curtain afforded them privacy; what was more, a storm on the second night flooded the berth with seawater, so that it was quite impossible for one to avoid having damp feet.

To make matters even more unbearable, it transpired that Mrs Strange was one of those unfortunates who are afflicted by nature with seasickness. By the second week of the voyage, she had given up, and had taken to her bunk to experiment with sleeping spells.

"Can you not simply _magic_ yourself well?" Grant suggested, surprisingly gentle, when he brought her a cold cloth for her face.

"Magic is most ineffectual against the humours. One is only too likely to cause some further imbalance. I believe that one of Mr Segundus' students has a particular interest in the topic, a Miss Redruth. I recall— he wrote me to say—" But she was too ill to remember what Mr Segundus had written, and shortly thereafter she closed her eyes to stop the world swaying.

She felt a cool hand on her forehead, combing wisps of her hair back, and low voices murmuring, and then it seemed that she was reading one of Mr Segundus' letters, a letter about writing letters, in which he attempted to explain that he could not fit himself inside an envelope, no matter how he tried, and oh! how frustrating it was! Oh, Mrs Strange! Mrs Strange wrote him back: _You must try a new kind of writing. You must ask the rocks and the birds and the rain_. Even in the dream, she did not know what this meant. Then she was baking a pie in her father's old kitchen, kneading out the crust by hand, and into the pie she put rosemary and bittersweet, ash-tree and hawthorn, a strand of Jonathan's auburn hair, the child she had not borne and the name she would have named it, a sky-blue bead of Venetian glass. _How long must you bake it for?_ Mr Segundus asked her. _Until the crust is the colour of England_ , she said.

She woke to hear someone humming at her bedside. Sea birds were crying overhead. From across the cabin, she could hear Miss Greysteel's laughter, the thwack of cards against a table, a small sound of masculine disgust.

"I am a disgraced person," Miss Greysteel's voice said. "We are very good at cards. It is a skill we are all required to learn."

Then Grant: "Had you been a gentleman, you would have made a fine rogue, Miss Greysteel."

"You would have made an admirable renegade, as a lady," Miss Greysteel said.

Mrs Strange opened her eyes. The boat was still heaving. She looked for the source of the humming that she had heard. A small chestnut-haired boy was seated on an upturned wood crate. But when she started to ask him if he was a sailor, she found that in fact he was not there, and she thought that perhaps she had only dreamt him.

"Bell!" Miss Wintertowne said, coming to her side. "Oh! Bell, you have been very ill."

Mrs Strange raised herself as high as her elbows. "How long did I sleep?"

"We are nearly at Portsmouth."

"Good Lord! I wish we _had_ taken the King's Roads." Mrs Strange groaned. "It could scarcely have been worse than this. Would you take my arm, Emma? I find I am in need of fresh air."

They went on deck. For the first time, Mrs Strange saw the sea all around them: the wide, wide dark of the waves' cockled blue, with little grains of white where their tips turned under. Far off to the north— was that England at last? That little line that seemed to recede on the horizon? Was that where, for so long, her dreams and hopes had lived? It seemed small; too small to ever house them completely.

"You cried out in your sleep," Miss Wintertowne said to her. "I was afraid for you."

"It was only a dream." Mrs Strange frowned and tried to remember. "But what a curious dream. Something about... rocks, and birds, and letters. Mr Segundus was in it."

"Have you written to him?"

"In Naples. I told him that we were coming to Yorkshire. When we are in London, I shall write to him again. I must tell him that Colonel Grant will after all be with us."

Miss Wintertowne said, amused, "You know, I fear that Miss Greysteel is corrupting him. He appears to think of her as a sort of feral young urchin."

"Well, I do not think we need be too concerned. He has never, to my knowledge, shown an interest in ladies; she will have a hard time, I think, if she wishes to run off with him."

"Perhaps her goal is merely to ruin him at cards. I believe she is a good ways to it. The man appears to have no instinct for self-preservation."

"I think he misses Jonathan," Mrs Strange said. She looked down. She had surprised herself. But she knew, she thought, what she was implying. "He seems— I do not know— sadder than he used to."

Miss Wintertowne gazed at her with serious eyes, an unreadable expression. "It is surprisingly common, as a symptom," she said.

Mrs Strange had opened her mouth to reply when she was interrupted by Grant himself: bursting out of their cabin in a spark of gold braids, brass buttons, and a flourish of flustered blond hair.

"Good Lord!" Grant exclaimed. "Good Lord, madam! No magic, you told me! You assured me! And now I find—! It is one thing to cure seasickness, and quite another to haunt a fellow!"

Mrs Strange said blankly, "What on earth?"

Miss Greysteel emerged from the cabin, looking guilty. "I know I ought to have told you, but you would have excoriated me entirely!" she said loudly. Her cheeks were flushing rather red.

"Oh, dear," Miss Wintertowne murmured.

Mrs Strange said, "Flora, what have you done?"

* * *

It shortly transpired that there was a ghost in the cabin. It was the chestnut-haired boy whom Mrs Strange had glimpsed while ill. He was now rather ambivalently opaque as a presence, but appeared to be achieving some measure of physical solidity as they neared the southern shore of England. "Well," he explained a little sulkily, under interrogation, "I am an English ghost, madam. It is only natural. English magic takes its power from the English land."

Mrs Strange said, puzzled, "I do not find it so. My husband and myself have worked English magic across the Continent."

"But you are flesh and blood, madam; you are English land itself.5 Any rates, I seem to be meant to go homewards." He had a bit of an unschooled London accent. "I expect you know how it works, as you are a magician. The house was an envoy; Miss Greysteel is my path, and England itself shall be my handsel. It were a bit of a circuitous route, to be sure."

"But whoever is the magician?" Mrs Strange asked. She was quite astounded. She could not see that John Uskglass would be much interested in summoning up a single dead poet, or that he would have done it so messily; she was also aware of the magic as having what she would term a rather different flavour.

"Ah," the boy said, looking uncomfortable. He darted a glance at Miss Greysteel.

Miss Greysteel drew in a breath that suggested she was to embark upon a Catiline oration. "Firstly, you cannot condemn me," she said, "for was not Miss Wintertowne returned from death, with—eventually— no ill effects? And have not other magicians practiced similar magic? Did not the Raven King himself raise Henry Barbatus? Secondly, I did not intend to do it, and in the cause of justice, intent must be measured. I would call, for my references, upon such noted philosophers as—"

"But you are not a magician!" Mrs Strange interrupted. (She was not particularly interested in Miss Greysteel's philosophical references.)

A glint of misery shone on Miss Greysteel's face. "I do not know how I did it," she said. "I cannot make any other sort of spell work. And, oh! please do not send him back. He does not wish to be dead, and he is so very charming. You would not believe me in Rome, but he lived in my linen cupboard. He used to write me little poems."

Mrs Strange closed her eyes and put a hand to her forehead. "I am not," she said, "going to send him back; I do not know that I am certain of how such a thing may be done. We shall have to consult with the Society in York. I am going to go and mend matters with Colonel Grant, whom you have given a fright to. Perhaps you could refrain from raising any more of the dead, just for the time being, as we have such limited space on board ship."

Lt Colonel Grant was where she had left him: on the leeward deck, looking windblown. He seemed to have calmed down a fair bit; but then, she considered, it was not really a fright he'd been given, was it? He was not so unaccustomed to the dead. She rather thought she understood something of his reaction. But she thought: let us be plain with one another. In truth, she was feeling seasick, and perhaps a little savage.

Grant glanced over at her with a kind of trepidation. When she did not speak, after a moment he said, "At least your husband was so good as to give some kind of warning before called up the spirits of the dead."

"It's a different kind of magic," Mrs Strange said. "No corpses, this time."

"I must say I am glad to hear it."

"You were not always so skittish. I recall you being quite delighted when Jonathan used magic. You used to encourage him to spill wine on tabletops at parties and summon visions. It was the most shamelessly flamboyant trick."

"—Yes," Grant said, after a pause. "I had forgotten about that." His voice had a curious hurt in it. "You will recall that it took a turn for the less entertaining. Or perhaps you will not, as you were not there for it."

"The corpses, of course, were very entertaining."

He was silent for a long time, hands clenched on the railing. He said at last, "I do not know what you want me to confess. Magic has lost its charms; does it matter why?"

"I suppose not," Mrs Strange said. "I only wondered if you knew."

It explained, she thought, why he was the one who had been borne the message. There were many emotions that served to fuel magic— sorrow, envy, and regret were only a few, but a few of the most powerful. Heart-ache, lost-hope: both lent their names to castles in Faerie; which was a measure of their strength.6 She felt that perhaps she ought to be sorry for Lieutenant Colonel Grant. Where was it he said he'd been with his regiment? Africa? Had that been far enough away? And now to be wound back in like a bird on a ribbon.

She touched the cuff of his alarmingly scarlet sleeve. "Forgive me," she said. "You have been very patient. You do not have to come to Yorkshire; I shall make your apologies if you wish. Though— I would welcome your company."

Grant huffed a sound that was halfway to a laugh. "A soldier has no choice, madam; I recognize the sensation. I will go to Yorkshire whether I wish it or not.

"Goodness! You make us sound quite ferocious company."

"Are you not, Mrs Strange?" But he was smiling a little. "Do you not find yourself ferocious?"

She returned the smile. She said, "Perhaps I am. Perhaps I have learned to be."

* * *

1 There are those who believe that the figure of Viviane, who is also sometimes rendered as Nimue, is based upon a French misunderstanding of early English magical figures. In particular a tale is told about the early reign of the Raven King: that the young Raven King— for, after all, John Uskglass, though already a great conqueror, was only a child when he became king— was once protected from his enemies by a changeling sorceress. This lady had been stolen as an infant into Faerie, but the fairy queen who had stolen her soon tired of her wailing, and abandoned her to be raised by the stones and the trees. So it was that the sorceress, who seems to have been called Vervain, grew to view herself as being more a stone or a tree than any other kind of creature. And when the Raven King's enemies came to destroy him, it was because Vervain spoke the language of stones and trees that she was able to hide him: first inside a small pebble on the eastern shore of the Irish Sea, then in a black lump of coal beneath Newcastle, then inside the trunk of a tree in his own magic wood, called Serlo's Blessing, then finally inside the kernel of an acorn that was sown alone upon a desolate waste in Northern England. To thank her for this protection, when the danger had passed, John Uskglass offered her a seat at his court, and it was from this lady that he learned the language of stones and trees.

This legend is somewhat confused by the fact that the herb Vervain is known as a physical remedy— said to be good, in particular, "against the biting of serpents and other venomous beasts," (vide _Culpeper's Complete Herbal & English Physician_) and to have stopt Jesus' wounds when He was taken from the cross— and also as a magical remedy, in which realm it is associated with cold iron, and thus with protection from evil magic. Some modern interpreters have claimed that Vervain the sorceress is merely intended to symbolize or in some sense personify the herb.

2 Miss Greysteel had heretofore demonstrated a lack of talent for magic that had proved most disappointing to her, though she would not admit her disappointment. Rather, she preferred to affect an attitude of disdain for magic, as though she could not think why anyone would shew interest in it. Mrs Strange had several times caught her attempting spells in secret, and each time had very carefully pretended not to see, so that Miss Greysteel might go on feigning scorn for the practice.

3 "I recall when I was last in Naples with Lord Byron," said Miss Greysteel. "He was most adamant that we should visit the ruins of Pompeii. There are some, you know, who find it quite ghastly, but to me it seemed rather tame. I have long been enamored of death and ruins."

"How interesting," Miss Wintertowne said, in a tone that implied it was anything but. "I believe that the Lady of the Bone-Harp and the Holly-Bell-Pipes, who rules over the kingdom of Twilight-Dreary, had a manservant who was from Pompeii. Perhaps I met the fellow. I cannot really recall now. Stephen would know."

To which there was no way, really, that Miss Greysteel could respond.

4 It is a common practice among English seamen, particularly those from the North, to name their ships after great magicians and servants of John Uskglass, in the hope of winning the Raven King's favor. This custom had somewhat fallen out of favor by the end of the 18th century, but was revived by the introduction of Jonathan Strange into the Army, whereupon it again became extremely fashionable for warships captured from the French to be given magical English names. (Vide, for instance, the H.M.S. _Master of Nottingham's Daughter_ , commanded by Captain Thomas Pullings after being taken by the H.M.S. _Surprise_ under Captain, later Admiral, Jack Aubrey.)

5 The ghost is quite correct in his assertion here. In English magic, there is no differentiation between the flesh of the body and other kinds of flesh; e.g. the flesh of a tree, a meadow, a river, or a stone. It is tempting to attribute the origin of this worldview to the influence of fairies, who hold rather different views on the animacy of objects; however, it is equally possible that the belief arises from the observation that human bodies are fed by trees, rivers, and so on, and therefore can be said to emerge from them; so also human bodies, through the process of decomposition, will eventually feed the meadows, rivers, and trees. In any case, the body of an English magician is considered a form of English territory.

6 Very few places in Faerie are named for happinesses. One reason for this is that happiness does not beget strong magic, though it can be useful in the sustenance of it. This does not mean that all magically powerful emotions are sorrowful; on the contrary, experiences of awe, ecstasy, and wonder are considered exceptionally strong. One of Miss Caroline Redruth's early papers for the Learned Society of York Magicians considered jubilation, and its relative merits in regards to magical strength. Her conclusion was that it is specifically useful for spells intended to cause pleasure, and that it has a seasonal cycle, wherein it climaxes in strength at the time of the winter solstice, then wanes as winter becomes spring.


	4. The Turned Face of England

 

_My dear Mrs Strange,_

  
_What a delight it is to hear that we shall soon be united! There are so many questions to which I think you shall provide the answers, and it will bring great joy to my pupils, too, who have so many enquiries for you concerning your observations of Faerie (viz. its material and immaterial parts), your apprehension of the New English Magic, and your reflections upon the philosophies of your husband. It is my most earnest hope that you may find them a worthwhile collocation of young persons, as I— occasionally— do._

_I expect that you will find England much changed. I must endeavour to warn you about those changes which may particularly affect your journey. You have heard, perhaps, of the roads that Mr Strange opened; you will know, perhaps, that new roads appear. Roads from the mirrors that rain forms on stone; fairy roads that have hidden for centuries. Indeed one may not know when taking a road in the North, now, where that road may lead to. And magic has come back everywhere. It is a an inexpressible delight, a continuous wonder, the most captivating of revolutions, and yet safe it is not. One must exert some caution, particularly when traveling north of Lincolnshire._

_I have asked Mr Childermass, who travels a great deal more than I do, to assist me in assembling some general prescriptions. Firstly, it is unwise to travel at dawn or twilight; indeed, night is a great deal safer than twilight, if you would believe it! 1 Secondly, you must by all means stay on the marked paths. Thirdly— well, I shall assert myself so far as to imagine that Miss Wintertowne or yourself would know a fairy if you saw one! Indeed, it is not unlikely that the fairy might know you! They are wild creatures— certainly the ones who are in England. It is best to be wary of them, and carry yew and cold iron. DO _[Mr Segundus had underlined this word several times] _strive to prevent any confrontation, if you please! The diplomatic situation is so delicate! Only a fortnight ago, I was forced to engage in negotiations for the return of an unfortunate gentleman from the Learned Society of York Magicians who had offended a fairy lady he met by the roadside and been taken off into Faerie to make good the fault! His family was most insistent that they would not stand for it, and I am afraid they offended the fairy a good deal more; it was only by offering eight memories of honest labour and my very best pair of boots that I succeeded in securing the release of the man. Since then I have been twice visited in my dreams by fairies enquiring if I might explain certain Christian politenesses. They appear to have taken me for a diplomatic official of some fashion!_

_Mr Childermass appends that it is well to consider bartering for safe passage. Certain... entities... of the landscape may believe this requisite. The Starecross garden will not yield unless we feed it milk and ale first. I am told there is a river in Cheshire that turns most vengeful if not appeased with some manner of offering or pledge. Better careful, I can only suppose!_

_I shall await your arrival most eagerly, and hope that you are not too inconvenienced by this strange new world which we are pleased to call England._

  
_Your affectionate servant,_

_John Segundus_

  
So it was that Arabella Strange came back to a changed England.

She knew before the ship had docked in Gravesend. From the deck, she could smell it in the air— England! But a more English England than she had left it. She was not able, exactly, to quantify the scent; perhaps it was green, perhaps it was damp, perhaps it was moss on stonework, perhaps it was bronze tools mouldering in the earth; perhaps it was a wind that had been through the wetness of gardens, on the seas and in the crags, and out among the low moor heather. But, in truth, it was none of that. It was magic, and she had not anticipated it, somehow. What is magic? It is not a scent! It is not a _real_ thing, that one may see, smell, or touch. And yet here it was, borne up from the brackish Thames water, and she leant out over the ship-side and breathed it in.

Not one of her companions seemed to evidence the slightest notice of the magic, though Miss Greysteel's ghost (Mr Keats was his name) grew far more solid as they disembarked, enough to be seen to be holding Miss Greysteel's hand in his own.

Were there rules of etiquette, Mrs Strange wondered, governing ladies and ghosts? There would have to be all sorts of new rules for this new world. There would have to be some way to govern it.

London itself seemed unchanged, though she knew it was not; her little house in Soho-square had disappeared, and so too had Mr Norrell's house in Hanover-square, and so it was for Mrs Strange really an entirely different city. How peculiar to be in London without a home to go to! All of the places one used to visit became unmoored, and it was as though one stood at odd angles to them. She had thought that perhaps she might be overcome by emotion, arriving at last back in London again, but in fact she had the sense that she had not quite arrived, and that she never would be able to quite arrive again, for the London she had known was now lost to the past.

In this, she found her own feelings mirrored.

"I shall be glad to be out of London," Miss Wintertowne said.

* * *

  
They had secured a coach to take them to Yorkshire and set out northwards shortly before midday, grinding out of the city and into the countryside. The landscape did not look so very altered, or it did not at least to Mrs Strange, but as they left Wansford, where they had changed horses, rain began falling, and it seemed behind the curtain of the rain that the green fields stirred and moved like sea-currents, and flickered sometimes with improbable castles, with trees like spines, and other darkling shapes. She blinked, and they were once more the green fields of England.

Miss Greysteel said wonderingly, "I feel as though I'm dreaming."

"It is the rain," Miss Wintertowne said. "It is so very full of mirrors." She sank back into her traveling cloak, sallow and unnerved.

Lt Colonel Grant did not look much more at ease.

Mrs Strange could not decide whether she was glad to be back in England. Out of a certain loyalty to her friends, she wanted to be frightened of the world around her. Yet she was not; she felt, rather, entranced by it; welcomed, as though she had been a long time in the cold, and stood now at last at the threshold of shelter. Some waiting fire enticed her; a promise of warmth that made her think of Ashfair, of Jonathan asleep in the next room, so near that if she called to him he would wake. It was hard to feel so close to him.

Mr Keats, the ghost, now looked much like a human, but paradoxically, also much more dead. His cheeks were pale and a little sunken. He was a beautiful young man, but his eyes were feverish. He said, "England is more magical now than when I left. Perhaps magic is still coming back to it."

It was not a sentiment that reassured those in the coach.

"I think," Miss Greysteel said with a little shiver, "that I would be quite content with a touch less magic."

They had meant to stop at Grantham, but the rain had slowed them. By the time the light began to dim, they were still in the lush thick of the quilted countryside, a place that once no one might have thought to call wilderness.

"Well," Mrs Strange said, with an anxious look out the window, "I suppose we are not quite in the North yet.2 Perhaps we might press on a little further."

Grant said, "I am certain that we are perfectly safe. I have a fine set of pistols here, should we need them. I cannot imagine that England has altered so much as to become a kind of fairy country."

"But you have been in Africa," Mrs Strange said. "You have not been in England."

Grant made the sort of sound that men customarily make when they are dismissing women.

Miss Greysteel said uncertainly, "Perhaps there may be an inn. I do not mind so very much staying in rough places."

Miss Wintertowne raised an eyebrow at this; perhaps she doubted, like Mrs Strange, that Miss Greysteel had been to many rough places. But she said nothing, merely peered out at the darkening light.

"I shall have a word with the coachman, and ask him," Grant said.

He had to stop the coach to do so. In the stillness, the rain drummed against the roof. The little puddles on the road broke like mirrors with each drop, silver water shivering. The wind stirred. In London, it had smelled so much like England, but now it seemed to come from Other Lands: from dark and rich forests, cold and abundant, and sunless halls where black rivers ran. Some of the scents were familiar, to one who had been in Faerie. Others were still foreign. But oh! how she wanted to know where that wind came from! How she wanted to reach the source of those scents, which were amber and mossy, heavy and sweet— as crisp as apples and as bloody as crimson—

Miss Greysteel's hand had crept to the latch of the coach. "Oh!" she whispered. "It is just like a poem! Oh, how lovely it is!"

"It is making us promises," Mr Keats said dreamily. "It says I shall be alive again."

Even Miss Wintertowne looked happier than Mrs Strange had ever seen her. Her eyes sparkled with longing, and her face was flushed. It seemed most sensible that they ought all to get out of the carriage, and run out into the mist and rain, across the wet fields, till they found the forests— the halls— the wondrous caverns— the splendid, eerie kingdoms that were waiting for them—

Then a burst of black birds rose up from a meadow, with much cawing and croaking and beating of wings. They were calling out to Mrs Strange, and she could perceive their meaning quite clearly. They demanded that she give them her heart, so they could carry it away.

"But where shall you take it?" she asked, confused. It did not seem a sensible thing to do.

The birds assured her that they would take it to Jonathan, in the Darkness.

"But however shall you get there?" she asked.

The birds knew the way. They shewed her: it was very much simpler than she had imagined, or it would have been, if she were a bird.

"Well, all right," she said doubtfully, and no sooner had she said it than she felt a great warmth, and she saw Jonathan holding her heart in his own two hands. He folded it up, very absent-minded— indeed, he did not even seem to realize he had it!— and tucked it into the little silver locket where he kept a coil of her hair. She thought she ought to be offended by how vague and inattentive he was; and goodness! how his curls needed to be trimmed! And what on earth was he wearing, and when had it last been laundered?

But she was distracted from the image by the sudden sense that she was in danger, and that she must act very quickly if all were not to be lost. She no longer felt inclined to climb out of the carriage, yet she found that her hand was still on the latch, and that— curiously enough— she was opening the door! Bewildered, she blinked, and the rain seemed to shiver, and it told her that it must drive a nail through her hand.

"Why on earth would you do that?" she asked, rather alarmed. She did not like this idea at all.

The rain said that she must trust it.

"I suppose if I must," Mrs Strange said. "But only because the moment is quite dire."

A drop of cold rain struck her hand, and it was a spike driving through her. No one seemed to mind her when she cried out with the pain. They were all quite firmly in the thrall of the wind. Indeed, Miss Greysteel was clambering to get out of the carriage.

"Flora! No!" Mrs Strange said sharply. She took a good hold of Mrs Greysteel's hand and turned it so that the rain caught her palm. She commanded the rain to be a spike. Miss Greysteel jerked her wrist sharply, and let out a little cry. _But where can I send her heart?_ Mrs Strange wondered wildly. She did not think it right to be so free with other people's hearts. She certainly would not trust anyone else's heart to Jonathan! He would leave it lying about in an old dressing gown pocket, or use it like a scrap of paper to mark his place in a book.

A bird cawed.

Of course, Mrs Strange thought. She would send it to Mr Segundus, and he would keep it tied up in a ribbon with Mrs Strange's letters. He was the most scrupulous person; he would take excellent care. The birds seemed to agree when Mrs Strange told them this, and she sent them off with Miss Wintertowne's heart as well, and with the heart of Mr Keats the ghost (for he had a heart, she was astonished to perceive, though it was an odd thing, more like a coal-heart than flesh).

"I feel so curious," Miss Wintertowne said. She sounded very dazed. She rubbed at her eyes. "Bell, what have you done?"

Mrs Strange said, "Here, you must give me your hand." And she ensured that Miss Wintertowne and Mr Keats were safe.

By this time, they were all very much drenched. The moon slid through a cloud at the edge of the horizon The sky had turned to blue-darkness. Miss Greysteel was shivering violently, clutching her shoulders.

"Have— have we been enchanted?" she asked. She looked around, as though she were still emerging from a dream. "Arabella? Where is Colonel Grant?"

Mrs Strange flung her hand over her mouth, appalled. In the peril, she had quite forgotten Grant.

He had not got very far. He was standing in the rain by the side of the road, his fair hair plastered to his head, staring out into the heavy damp velvet of twilight. He had not heard Mrs Strange's approach; he started when she came near to him, and she moved slowly, as she might with a panicked animal.

There was a look of deep confusion on his face. "Forgive me," he said. "I did not mean to wander off. Only..." He gestured vaguely. "I cannot seem to stop myself doing it." He frowned, and looked down as though he might find some explanation there, by examining the road, or perhaps his feet.

He did not appear to have a heart, which Mrs Strange thought ought to alarm her. How on earth was she to hide his heart if he did not have one? Then it came to her that perhaps he had hidden it already. "What have you done with your heart?" she asked, to be certain.

"My... heart?" He sounded lost. "Oh, that. I gave it to Merlin, when we were in the Peninsula, so that he could confuse the French. Or— so that I would not be confused by his devils and so forth." He squinted. "I suppose I never did get around to asking for it back."

And indeed when she thought about it, she could picture it quite clearly: Grant's heart lay forgotten in the little left-hand pocket of the fawn waistcoat Jonathan had gone to war in. The waistcoat was tossed over a library chair-back at Ashfair, as though Jonathan had meant to come back for it. She stared at Grant. She had the oddest impulse, all of a sudden, to weep and fling her arms around him. She did not know why, except that this was so like Jonathan— to wander off with Grant's heart, failing to remember that he had it, quite as careless with other people's hearts as she had imagined— and the impression of him was so strong in her mind still, the rumpled shirt and unruly hair she had briefly glimpsed.

But Grant was wandering off again, in a kind of drunken, bewildered lurch, and she had to reach quickly to catch ahold of his wrist.

"I'm afraid," she said, "that this will hurt quite a lot." And she told the rain to drive a spike through his hand, till she felt his whole body flinch, and knew that it was done.

They stared at one another. Mrs Strange had not let go of his hand. She used her other hand to push her dripping hair out of her face. It was heavy with rain, as her skirts and coats were; she felt weighed down with water and chilled to the bone. "It was a fairy wind. You were enchanted," she told him. "Though a good deal less than you would have been if your heart were where it's supposed to be."

She could see Grant assume a veneer of distance to hide his discomforted wince. His posture straightened. He unbuttoned his scarlet coat, obviously intending to offer it to her, although he was shivering already, and it was very wet.

"Please don't. You'll catch your death," she said. "Where is the coachman?"

"I'm afraid the poor fellow seems to have run off to—" Grant hesitated. He seemed to not like to say it.

"To Faerie," Mrs Strange supplied. "Or to some other place, I suppose." She peered out into the dark. Rain whispered on stones. Shadows were moving over the hedge. She could still, very faintly, smell that alluring fragrance, but it aroused in her no excitement. "Ought we to go after him?" she asked uncertainly. "I do not like to leave him out there."

Grant gazed at her, and she at him. They shared the same apprehension: they did not know what might await them, if they left the road. They did not even know if the ill-fated coachman still lived. They had still to reach Grantham, through the rain and the nightfall.

"One cannot save everyone," Grant said. He made an elegant, insufficient gesture of _what-can-one-do_. It seemed at odds with his wretched, halfway-drowned appearance.

"No," Mrs Strange said. She could imagine him saying it in the Peninsula to soldiers, men whom he had led to their deaths; or in Africa, similarly, with the same dashing manner. It occurred to her to wonder if it ever felt wanting to him.

He offered her his arm, and they picked their way back to the carriage. White faces were waiting for them: Miss Wintertowne leaning quite far from coach-door, so that rain weighted her eyelashes and beaded on her lips. She reached to catch Mrs Strange's hand in her own cold fingers, in a hurtfully unyielding grasp.

"I hate England," she said with surprizing violence. "Oh! how I hate it. I will not let it have you as well."

"I am safe," Mrs Strange reassured her. "But we have lost our coachman. Poor man— perhaps he is lucky, and only lost in a hedgerow."

"I suppose I can drive the horses," Lt Colonel Grant said. "It will be a wet ride of it, and I do not know the country, but I feel we must press on from this place, before we come to further mischief."

It was generally agreed that this was the case. Mrs Strange argued that she could just as capably drive the horses, having many times done so in the past, with Jonathan; however, Lt Colonel Grant's sense of honour would by no accounts allow this. He took his place in the driving rain, and they set out, with a shudder of wheels through thick mud. Though the horses were spooked, they moved at a good pace, and very rapidly Mrs Strange— her hand still clutched by Miss Wintertowne— was lulled into a trance-state close to sleep.

She was startled from it when Miss Greysteel asked, "What did you do? I could feel you did something— I am not so unclever— but I do not know what it was you did. You spoke an odd sort of language, and I could not understand you."

"Did I?" Mrs Strange asked. "I do not think so. Only I had to reply to the rain and the birds. They told me what I must do.3 While I am thinking of it, you must remind me to give your hearts back. Mr Segundus has them bound up with a ribbon in a little desk drawer. But I think it safer for them to stay there whilst we are travelling."

Miss Wintertowne did not like this idea, and said so. She was very vehement about it.

"But you would like a great deal less to be stolen back to Faerie," said Mrs Strange, who was very tired and ill-humoured, and at the end of her patience.

Miss Wintertowne lowered her eyes and was silent for a moment. "Do what you will with my heart, then," she said at last, in a deliberately off-hand kind of way.

* * *

They changed horses in Grantham, and acquired a new coachman. He was a raw-boned young Northerner with a shock of black hair. He wore a jet bead on a cord around his neck. It was this that drew Mrs Strange's eye, and caused her to ask if he would take them so far as Starecross.

Grant was at her shoulder, a commanding presence. But the boy did not regard him. His gaze was fixed on Mrs Strange.

"Aye," he said. "I can take you there, milady."

"Oh, I am no lady," Mrs Strange said quickly.

"I know who you are. You are Mrs Strange." He bobbed his head respectfully. "You have been in the other countries. Your husband is the magician. It would be more than my life's worth, if I cannot keep you safe."

Mrs Strange was taken aback. She was perhaps a recognizable person, due to the furore that had surrounded her "death" and resurrection from Faerie, but she thought that no one except Jonathan and Miss Wintertowne might have said it was more than their lives' worth to keep her safe. Indeed, the lasting and hurtful discovery of that resurrection was how very little difference it made if one were alive. For many people, it seemed most inconvenient. This revelation had not made a misanthrope of her; rather, she saw that she would have to labour to insist on her liveliness to others, and to take heed of the liveliness that was in them. It was hard work for one who felt herself an ordinary person. She did not quite expect to be so freely valued. It seemed a little like flattery.

However, he was one of the only persons, even amongst those of her acquaintance, who had referred to Jonathan as though he were not dead, and this, she found, endeared him to her in no insignificant manner.

"—Thank you," she said after a moment. "What is your name?"

"I am Graham, milady. Graham Carterhouse."

"All right, then. Thank you, Graham."

"Superstition," Grant murmured, when the boy had gone to care for the horses.

Mrs Strange said, "I should think you'd have cause, by now, to be superstitious."

"That does not mean I have to like the matter." He looked in fact very disapproving of it. He had pulled his shoulders back in his damp scarlet coat. Mrs Strange had observed already, on quite a short acquaintance, that this was something that he did whenever he felt threatened— as though he were offended by some part of him that wished to be afraid.

They rejoined the others, all somewhat drier than before, and prepared to take to the road again. Miss Greysteel had acquired a parcel of cheese and apples, and seemed amenable to sharing it; only the ghost declined, and Miss Wintertowne— declaring herself not hungry. Even the boy Graham, who had a good hand with the horses, accepted an apple to eat as he drove.

The rain had lessened. It was still night when they set out. Mrs Strange wondered if Graham would share Mr Segundus' misgivings about travelling at dawn. Perhaps he thought that he was protected. For all she knew, perhaps he was. She had a sense that his jet bead symbolized the Raven.4 But she felt she knew, in fact, little about this king. What she knew was what Mr Segundus had told her; what Jonathan had told her; what she had read in the books by Lord Portishead. She had not grown up in the North, and in her own quiet Shropshire home, Northern history had been very little discussed. How, therefore, was she meant to form more than a piecemeal idea of such a person? People said he had imprisoned Jonathan in darkness; this she did not believe, but neither had he released Jonathan from it. Jonathan had said he was the foundation of all English magic; but she was not sure any longer, now that she was a magician, that she fully understood what he had meant. In Rome, her tea cup had held a raven, and she had felt herself plucked up by its claws; helpless in the grip of a summoning sensation that she would half describe as hope and half as love.

But she could not account for this love, nor could she understand the faith that a figure would come out of the night to stand between oneself and danger. In her own experience, there had been no such figure. Only long corridors, and endless mirrors, and then her small body running, running towards light.

* * *

They crossed into the North just shy of dawn. The coach paused, and Mrs Strange— who had almost been sleeping— heard the murmur of a voice, followed by the _plash_ of breaking water. She thought that perhaps Graham had thrown something into a river. Her drowsy mind was glad of it. She let her head droop, and her eyes fell closed, and she dreamed formless dreams about the flight of birds, and rain on stones, and Jonathan's waistcoat pockets, and the library at Ashfair, where she had left a novel three-quarters unfinished, so that she had never found how it ended. In her dream, she picked up the novel, but the print had all vanished. In its place, the white paper that had once been trees whispered, and what it whispered to her was: _Speak to me_.

She woke because the wheels of the carriage were slowing. A very fine light the colour of Chinese porcelain was slowly lifting the dark from the land. Lt Colonel Grant and Miss Greysteel were asleep. The ghost of Mr Keats had pressed his face to the windowframe. His large eyes, which looked bruised, followed the arc of dawn sparrows-flight with an unreadable look of hunger in them.

Miss Wintertowne alone saw that Mrs Strange had awoken. The faint and brittle trace of anger which she had maintained since the magic Mrs Strange had performed outside Grantham seemed to have been overset, and in its place was a pale kind of worry. "I do not know why we have stopped," she said. "We are far from any town, I fear."

Mrs Strange said uncertainly, "Should you like me to go and ask?"

"No!" Miss Wintertowne's white hand fluttered up to stop her. "You must not leave the coach!"

Mrs Strange too felt a curious dread, a feeling that whispered she ought not to go out onto the road, that indeed she ought to stay as still as she possibly could, like a quivering hare when the hunt is almost upon it, hoping that it may yet retreat from notice. Something, she thought, was noticing her, and she was not at all sure that she wished to be noticed by it.

"Perhaps I could—" Mr Keats said after a moment. But his voice had gone very quiet, and Mrs Strange knew he felt the same sensation.

They sat there: three cornered woodland creatures. But Mrs Strange considered that they were not like hares— she was of the opinion that Miss Wintertowne had quite sharp teeth, and certainly a feral quality to her. It was this that gentlemen, and at times Mrs Strange, found so alarming. Mrs Strange herself had at least some defense by magic. And the ghost— well, as the feeling of dread swelled and crested, the ghost seemed to grow even more dead-looking, so that the bones of his face stood out, and his hands were long and skeletal. It was not at all very comforting to see.

A footstep sounded on the gravel of the road. Then another: a strange pace, limping. It occurred to Mrs Strange that there was something awful about the footsteps. She could not say what it was, exactly; only that they suggested some unspeakable aspect, something horrible that she did not want to glimpse. She found herself cringing away from the side of the coach as the crunch of the footsteps grew nearer. She tried desperately to think of magic. There was the Rausyngdale river charm, which was intended to place seven rivers between the magician and danger5 — this was a folk spell that had become popular since the restoration of magic, one which Mr Segundus described as "reasonably worthwhile," but which was extremely specific in its protections. She thought that it could do no harm, and might do a fair bit of good, though it was ideally accompanied by an anointing with English water, and she was summoning up the necessary rivers in her mind when the approaching footsteps paused and stilled.

There was a long shrill scrape against the side of the coach, as of a very sharp fingernail drawn slowly over metal. A silence: and then a huff of breath. One of the horses cried out, nervous. Then a deeper huff of breath and a lumbering turning. The footsteps retreated, growing faster and more loping as they faded into the distance.

Mrs Strange drew in a breath. She found that she was shuddering all over. Her eyes met Miss Wintertowne's eyes. We have had a very narrow escape, their eyes seemed to say to each other.

A whip cracked, and the coach was in motion again, running very fast along the road— almost careening, as though not only the horses but their driver had been spooked by the figure with the awful limp. Lt Colonel Grant slept on, though he made rather unsettled face while sleeping, and presently Miss Greysteel yawned and blinked at the coach around her.

"Goodness," she said, "I've had such a strange dream." She frowned. "Whatever has happened? You all look pale as the grave!"

But before Mrs Strange could begin to explain, a familiar voice outside the coach shouted, "Graham Carterhouse! Is that you?" It was a voice that was as rough and weathered as a Yorkshire moor, and she could not recall a time when she had been so glad to hear it.

For the voice belonged to John Childermass, who was astride a large dark stallion, as she saw when the coach stopped and she stepped down from it. Mr Childermass looked quite as she remembered: rather as though he had just slunk out of a shadow, with his black eyes, his crooked face, and his coal-coloured hair. He bore a new scar from his mouth to his eye, which did not diminish this impression. He was carrying a lantern, which he raised to look at her, though the early light had almost come in.

He did not greet her, but instead turned to Graham the coach-boy. "What were you thinking?" he said. "Travelling with undead things through the North on such a morning?"

"I beg your pardon, Mr Childermass," Mrs Strange said, in a tone that implied she did not in fact much care for his pardon, "but I wished to reach Starecross as soon as possible. I'm afraid we had lost our coachman. We had a bit of a scare. I must object to your describing my companions as 'things,' however; even if Mr Keats is a ghost—"

His hard black gaze rested heavily on her. She was conscious of her damp, bedraggled hair, her mud-stained skirts; she did not look, she suspected, very respectable at all. This did not, however, seem to be what Mr Childermass measured.

"As for that," Mr Childermass said, "it was not the ghost I meant. As for the other, you've been a fool, and no mistake about it. I'll ride alongside you now, and see you safe to the house; if I did not, I dare say _he_ would have my head."

Mrs Strange was a little enraged by the content of this declaration. She did not suffer herself to be called a fool by men. She had quite forgotten how offensive they could be, having lived for the better part of four years with women. Yet she knew herself to be tired and very sharp-tempered, and for a confrontation with Mr Childermass, she suspected, one needed one's wits. So she held her tongue for the moment and subsided. His knowing look and sideways smirk said he knew what she was up to, but he did not chuse to comment on it. He swung his horse and gestured curtly towards the carriage. A clear message: our conversation is concluded.

She waited pointedly for a moment, not liking to appear to do as she was told— then felt that this was probably a childish sentiment, and climbed into the carriage with a small huff of displeasure.

"Well," she said to the world at large. "I find not everything in England has altered. Mr Childermass is still most unpleasant. In fact I find his change in status has only made him moreso. Still— I suppose it is a little reassuring."

The carriage lurched, and then they were rolling towards Starecross. The clouds parted for a moment, and a very pure light pulled the colours to the surface of the country, so that the green was very green, and the grey was very dark, and the brown mottled patches on the low, low slopes seemed to have a gold to them, and the shadows that moved over the face of the earth seemed very much like a incorporeal hand that felt tenderly towards everything it touched. It was very beautiful, and perhaps that was unaltered also; only it had not revealed itself as such to Mrs Strange. Now, at last, England had turned to face her.

"It looks like something from a story book," Miss Greysteel said wonderingly. "John Uskglass' kingdom."

"Yes," Mrs Strange said.

 

* * *

 

1 The reason for this, which Mr Segundus did not here mention, is that night is the domain of John Uskglass. Whereas dawn and dusk are traditionally fairy-times, when there is most traffic between this world and Other Lands, the subjects of John Uskglass are protected by night. The great difficulty in these modern times lies in determining who is and is not a subject of John Uskglass. Certainly those in the North who swear him as their king may count themselves safe, and all magicians who have not offended against him, but as for the rest, who can say? History tells us that the Raven King looks kindly on the English, and on all those who give their hearts to him. Perhaps for those who are entering into dark places, the safest course is to say, as did that well-known Basque sailor, _I greet thee, Lord, and bid thee welcome to my heart_.

2 Northern England, in its proper sense of John Uskglass' kingdom, finds its southernmost boundary at the River Trent.

3 As any student of magical history will recognize, what the birds and the rain communicated to Mrs Strange was a somewhat altered version of a prescription by Paris Ormskirk, in his _Revelations of Thirty-Six Other Worlds_. Jonathan Strange used this original spell to great effect in order to protect himself and the King of Southern England from a malicious fairy. Following the restoration of English magic, several iterations of this spell circulated with much popularity, all relying on the impediment of certain senses so as to overcome deception.

4 In fact, there is a history of association between the Raven King and Whitby jet. Jet has been known both as "John Uskglass' tears" and as "the Raven King's feathers." The latter term is often attached to those stories in which John Uskglass must make a long journey over the sea in the form of a raven, generally to complete some magical task, and sheds feathers as he goes, which are then washed ashore. (In reality, John Uskglass was indeed given to such journeys, and disinclined to reveal the nature of them, which has given rise to some very outlandish legends— vide, in Lord Portishead's _Collected Tales of the Raven King_ , the stories of "The Faroese Shipwright Who Stole the Sun," "The Sprig of Mistletoe That Slew John Uskglass," and "The Double-Rose That Grew in the Brugh at Bells-of-Langour.") The former term tends to be attached to stories that tell of John Uskglass' long absence from his chosen kingdom, and his grief that he must be parted from it. Needless to say, neither of the associations has a factual basis— Whitby jet was a desirable gemstone long before the conquest of Northern England.

5 The Rausyngdale river charm proceeds thus:

 _Between my hand and the hand of all who would strike me_  
_The Lord God place the River Lune_  
_Between my feet and the feet of all who would chase me_  
_St Oswald place the River Ure_  
_Between my eyes and the eyes of all who would enchant me_  
_St Kentigern place the River Esk_  
_Between my ears and the ears of all who would deceive me_  
_St Ninian place the River Ehen_  
_Between my tongue and the tongue of all who would mislead me_  
_St Hilda place the River Swale_  
_Between my blood and the blood of all who would bleed me_  
_St Cuthbert place the River Bleng_  
_Between my sword and the sword of all who would slay me_  
_William of Lanchester place the River Lyvennet_  
_And may the Raven King place all the rivers of England_  
_Between the ivy and the rowan branch._

The origins of this charm are unclear, aside from its Cumbrian situation; it is unusual for its equation not only of John Uskglass and his seneschal, William of Lanchester, with Christian saints, but also with the Christian God. Its final cryptic reference to ivy and rowan is often taken as a request for the Raven King to defend England (here represented by the ivy) from the danger of the Other Lands (here represented by rowan, which is much associated with fairy magic).

**Author's Note:**

> I am indebted to Stanley Plumly's _Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography_ for information on 26 Piazza di Spagna and its neighborhood.
> 
> Many thanks to [tigrrmilk](http://archiveofourown.org/users/tigrrmilk) for the beta!
> 
> I am on [tumblr](http://septembriseur.tumblr.com)!


End file.
